Towards A Pan–Cultural Personality Structure: Input from 11 Psycholexical Studies

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to find the common kernel of different trait taxonomic studies and find out how the individual structures relate to this common kernel. Trait terms from 11 psycholexically based taxonomies were all translated into English. On the basis of the commonalities in English, the 11 matrices were merged into a joint matrix with 7104 subjects and 1993 trait terms. Untranslatable terms produced large areas with missing data. To arrive at the kernel structure of the joint matrix, a simultaneous component analysis was applied. In addition, the kernel structures were compared with the individual taxonomy trait structures, obtained via principal component analysis. The findings provide evidence of a structure consisting of three components to stand out as the core of the taxonomies included in this study; those components were named dynamism, affiliation, and order. Moreover, the relations between these three kernel components and those of a six-component solution (completing the sixfactor model) are provided. Copyright © 2014 European Association of Personality Psychology Key words: lexical studies; cross-cultural research; statistical methods In order to arrive at an estimation of cross-cultural tenability of a trait structural model, generally two different routes can be followed. The first is that items based on a trait structure from one language or culture are translated and tested in another language for its applicability. This approach is often referred to by cross-cultural psychologists as the etic or even imposed-etic (Berry, 1969) approach. The second route, typically followed in the psycholexical approach to personality (De Raad, 2000), is that trait structures that are different in terms of number and nature of variables from different languages or cultures are compared as follows: (i) content-wise and/or (ii) by using psychometric means. Content-wise comparisons generally yield higher estimates of the number of cross-culturally valid factors than assessments through psychometric means (e.g. Brokken, 1978; cf. De Raad, Barelds, Levert, et al., 2010). This paper is positioned between the two forces of this second route, aiming to keep a balance between what is clear and valid in terms of content and what is psychometrically wise. In what follows, we come across more forces that are pushing and pulling with reference to what a proper cross-culturally valid model of personality traits should or could be. Some relate to an interest in what lies beyond the Big Five, some to a strict cross-cultural tenability, some to a belief in an early phrased Big Five model, and some to cultural-contextual informative accounts of personality dimensions. The interest of most cross-cultural studies is in both what is common to the trait structures under investigation and in how they differ, often with an emphasis on one or the other. The present study has its primary interest indeed in what may be seen as the common kernel to all.De Raad, Barelds, Levert, et al. (2010) pairwise compared t...

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